... has always been dangerous. I didn't click the link. It would rip me up inside to see her, I know that. But I've also known how dangerous it is to be female since a gang of boys chased me through a shopping mall when I was thirteen. I was so scared, I didn't even think about running to an adult until they'd scared me half to death.

Most men are good people, but for a few awful specimens, only the weight of civilization and fear of the law keeps them from taking any woman they want, doing what they will, and leaving the wreckage behind them to deal with the aftermath. I've been one of those women. I truly felt wrecked, like damaged goods. But eventually, I remembered who I was, and refused to let one monster haunt me forever. I had to work through acknowledging my own vulnerability in order to leave it behind. I learned that I can't afford to let someone like HIM redefine who I am.

So even though being a woman is dangerous, I refuse to let fear run my life. *smile* I'm too busy living it to worry about might-bes.

I have a far more pessimistic view of men as I was one of them as a peer and if it helps you to get through your life believing otherwise that is obviously your privilege. Sadly, the 'civilization' in vast parts of the world are created and run by men, and woman are little more than chattel and I am sure you know that. I sincerely doubt you would have such an optimistic view of men if you were living in such a society.

I would like to know if your viewpoint would change if you were to visit those societies and see the lives of those women. My mother grew up in a patriarchal Chinese society and the rules are made by and for them. She had no recourse in that society as you very luckily do have as you managed to run away from that pack of wolves. She had no such option really and had to grind it out with those packs of wolves.

And the percentage of women who get raped at least once in there lifetime is about 10 percent. I would not consider that an insignificant percentage of men.

You'll realize she said she HAS been raped and had to deal with the aftermath. She's said it before in more explicit terms. I am a man, and my post was about punishing the man. I worry about these societies with huge populations who are eliminating their women. What is going to happen when the ratios are 5:1 men to women?

I understand if you've been hurt by men that it would make you not like them. However to judge all men by the actions of some men isn't fair to them or yourself. We are half the population.

... by the actions of the one who raped me, or even by the actions of the ten percent you (and statistics) claim are out there, I would have spent my life fearing the 90% of men who wouldn't rape me no matter how much they wanted me. If I lived in your reality, I would have spent my life alternating between fear of and hatred for half the population, classified every male as an enemy combatant, and missed out on too many friendships to count and a loving marriage with a member of that 90% you so casually dismiss.

Your reality check sounds too much like crossing the street when you see someone walking towards you, because you know how prone their "kind" are to criminal acts. Yes, there are bad men out there. I know that from painful personal experience. I spent a long night trapped in an empty theatre with a man who used me in the worst possible ways, and made me do whatever he wanted by threatening to mutilate me with a knife. Was it horrific, degrading, frightening, humiliating? Yes. Was he evil? No question.

But will I allow that one experience to define ALL men in my heart and mind forever? Don't be absurd. I've met too many good men over the years to lump them all together with that one evil bastard who terrorized me so long ago.

We can only really speak from the context we're familiar with, i.e. contemporary Western society, where there's a combination of laws and cultural expectations to protect women and move towards treating them as equals. Change takes a long time - even in our society, until the 1960s if a woman got married she was expected to immediately give up her job and spend the rest of her life as a housekeeper. There are plenty of instructional books and videos from the 1950s where the (inevitably) male narrator espoused the concept that the primary role of a wife was to wait on her husband hand and foot, to make his home life as easy and as stress-free as possible after he'd spent a hard day (yeah, right, sure, as if) at the office. The last Magdalene Asylum in Ireland closed as late as 1996.

As the phenomenon became more widespread, it extended beyond prostitution to unmarried mothers, mentally retarded women, and abused girls. Even young girls who were considered too promiscuous and flirtatious, or too beautiful, were sent to an asylum by their respective families. This paralleled the practice in state-run asylums in Britain and Ireland in the same period, where many people with alleged "social dysfunction" were committed to asylums. The women were typically admitted to these institutions at the request of family members (mostly men). Without a family member on the outside who would vouch for them, many incarcerated individuals would stay in the asylums for the rest of their lives, many of them taking religious vows.

In less liberal countries, there's almost a combined legal, social and cultural expectation that men should behave irresponsibly - while the proportion of men who, if separated from any such influence, would act negatively towards women may be the same as elsewhere; with those societies geared around the abuse of women and dissenting voices quickly silenced by the powers-that-be, far more men are likely to behave irresponsibly because their country's history, law, society and culture has taught them from childhood that they're superior to women and can treat them however they want to. With nobody to tell them that such behaviour is wrong, they're likely to carry on with impunity because they do not believe that there's anything wrong in what they're doing (and what they've been doing for the past however many thousand years).

We know it's wrong and abhorrent, but they don't. Even worse, due to all the above factors, it's quite likely that many of the women who undergo such abuse believe they're inferior to men and so know, expect and accept such treatment. Effectively challenging such long-held notions is going to be a tough and slow process - Western nations barging in and overthrowing the government do not result in an overnight conversion to Western moral standards, and even when moral standards start to improve there's a significant group of people (probably mainly men) who resist such improvements and will do anything (including mass murder) to return to what they consider as more moral times when "men were men and women knew their place". When they've been acting that way for thousands of years, changing them for the better will be like trying to turn the proverbial supertanker. It will (probably) happen eventually, but what's needed is generations worth of diplomatic pressure and an increasing momentum as the (slightly) more liberal countries in the region implement reform. When the Western countries currently in Afghanistan pull out, that will prove a useful test case - will the relatively fragile reforms to improve women's rights hold or will the Taliban wrest control back again?

As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!

...barbaric is almost an understatement. From the practice of involuntary suttee (ceremonial killing of widows by burning them on the husband's funeral pyre) in India to routine abandoning of girls and gender-selective abortion in China, we see women all over the world being killed just because. Too often, however, we see infant and toddler girls (and boys) killed by either parent or caregiver; any one, Man or Woman, can be inhuman and cruel. An no culture has a corner on hurting children!

We should abhor and detest the abuse, neglect and killing of children, not because of what we stand for or who we are or what gender we identify with or sexual preference (another misnomer); we should be outraged because the harm of a child is wrong, no matter what, aye?

Until both sexes are seen as equal and equally valuable, then this sort of thing is going to continue. The payment of dowries has been outlawed in India for years - people still pay them.

India is still riven with a caste system, it still shuns untouchables and eunuchs. In Europe and North America, women of a certain age become invisible.

Most of the billions of people in this world have little or no education, children sift through mounds of rubbish living on what can be recycled - about 70pence per day. That too is monstrous. Genital mutilation of women by other women is monstrous - their only motive - it was done to them and is the culture.

We are simply sophisticated apes who play power games with each other to make life easier for ourselves. We hide behind religion or laws or plain brute force. Until we actually transcend this selfishness and genuinely love and accept each other as we or they are, we remain apes. We have the power to rise above all this, but we won't because it's easier and safer not to. We're just clever apes. (Though a few of us are feminist apes which keeps the flame alive but barely).

Bonobos have one of the most enlightened societies in the animal kingdom. They're matriarchal, sexually free, non-monogamous, substantially less agressive than chimpanzeees and other apes, they form close knit groups, and are said to be capable of compassion and empathy.

Infanticide is almost unknown amongst bonobos as well, food for thought.

Being born female in India and China (People's Republic of China) are the most common victim per population in the world (WHO stat). Even us transsexuals are only in second place. It is because these cultures, more than most, prize male decedents too highly.

The killing of infant girls in The People's Republic of China is causing their population to have more males than females. this means fewer girls to grow up to become wives and then mothers. The longer it goes on the worse it will get too.